A few weeks ago we published a tutorial How to Design a Blue Marketing Company Layout in Photoshop. Our friends at SnobbySlice have taken that design, coded it, and made it available for free download. The template includes the homepage design that was created for the tutorial, as well as a secondary page that can be used for the other pages on the site. The homepage includes a jQuery slider to provide information about the various services offered.

In the past few years the growth of the premium/commercial WordPress theme market has grown exponentially. While there are also premium plugins available, they generally get far less attention than premium themes. The right plugin will allow you to improve your site through specific functionality that might otherwise take a lot of time and/or money to set up.

In this post we’ll feature 15 premium plugins that may be able to help you with your own site or with those of clients. Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments at the end of the post.

Gravity Forms Gravity Forms is a form creation and management plugin that makes it quick and easy to add simple or advanced forms. Features include conditional form fields, email notification routing, dynamic field population, reply to entries from WP, autoresponers, allow users to create posts through a form (example, community news), and much more. A single-site license costs $39 and an unlimited developer’s license costs $199.

Freelance designers will probably spend more time in their home office than anywhere else. Having a comfortable office that is conducive to work is essential in order to keep your working hours pleasant and productive.

In this post we’ll look at some things that you can do to make your home office more comfortable and more enjoyable to spend those working hours. Obviously, some home offices come with certain limitations (such as the area of the house or the size of the space), but every situation could be improved in some way by the things in this list.

1. Get a Comfortable Desk Chair

Having a comfortable desk chair really is a necessity since you will be spending so much time in it. If you have an uncomfortable chair, you’re probably not enjoying your work as much as you could be. A good chair can cost a lot more than a cheap chair, but your health and comfort are worth the expense. For some tips, see How to Buy an Ergonomic Desk Chair.

I recently had the opportunity to interview multi-media designer Dan Noe. Many DesignM.ag readers have probably seen Dan’s portfolio site for Noe Design Studio showcased at various design galleries or blogs. Dan works at Screenscape Studios in Des Moines, Iowa. I hope you’ll find Dan’s insight and experience to be helpful in your own work.